I was just wondering if any of you have any experience with using the MS 360 controller on a mac, specifically with the GTA titles that just got released.

I assume theres going to be some sort of driver I'll have to download, but how about within the games?

I tried playing these games on my Windows partition and the game pad mapping was horrendous, and I had to download a bunch of third party software to get it barely working... I ended up giving up, and never playing any of the GTA titles that I bought.

Hopefully the prospect is better for the mac?

I've got SA and VC currently downloading. If anyone has any idea what to expect, I'd appreciate your input/tips/warnings!

There's no official support for the 360 controller on OSX, but there is a unofficial driver that works really well that you can download from here.

That said, I haven't tested it at all with GTA so I'll leave that for others to answer.

(Also note, that if you are using your 360 controller for OnLive on your Mac, installing that driver will cause issues)

Edit: Oh, as you mention, if the controls are horrible or non-existent, there's an app on the Mac App Store that lets you configure the controller, or even add support if the game has none. You can find it here.

There's no official support for the 360 controller on OSX, but there is a unofficial driver that works really well that you can download from here.

That said, I haven't tested it at all with GTA so I'll leave that for others to answer.

(Also note, that if you are using your 360 controller for OnLive on your Mac, installing that driver will cause issues)

Edit: Oh, as you mention, if the controls are horrible or non-existent, there's an app on the Mac App Store that lets you configure the controller, or even add support if the game has none. You can find it here.

Thanks for the input, SA just finished downloading.. going to try the controller when I get home. I installed the driver.

I noticed that the app your referred me to isn't free. Do you know of any free alternatives? I had this problem on the pc, and all the apparent solutions were to buy additional software to get the controller working, which led me to just giving up.

I think that it's pretty lousy that a game that was designed to play with a controller has so many issues on the computer.

Let's hope that driver does the trick and I don't need to purchase any additional software. I'll report back with my results.

Unfortunately, there was no gamepad support for the PC versions of GTA games before GTA 4. They were produced before the 360 controller existed, but that's no excuse because PC analog joysticks have been around forever. Using something like Xpadder (or whatever they have for the Mac) won't work well at all, because what the games really need is analog control support. All you're doing with a mapper is binding keyboard keys to the pad.

I didn't even bother buying the games, but I will if they ever release a "remastered" version with gamepad support.

Unfortunately, there was no gamepad support for the PC versions of GTA games before GTA 4. They were produced before the 360 controller existed, but that's no excuse because PC analog joysticks have been around forever. Using something like Xpadder (or whatever they have for the Mac) won't work well at all, because what the games really need is analog control support. All you're doing with a mapper is binding keyboard keys to the pad.

I didn't even bother buying the games, but I will if they ever release a "remastered" version with gamepad support.

Thanks for your post.

I wish I had known that before I purchased them. Thankfully I think I only paid like $15 for the entire series.

I just tried the controller real quick with the driver, and the the camera just keeps spinning in circles, it's pretty bad.

Is controller support something that can be patchable? If we bug the developers enough would they come through? *sigh*